Meet the Team

After completing her PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Georgia, Dr. Bright spent eight years on the faculty at the University of Florida in both the College of Medicine and College of Education. While at UF, she led evaluations of Florida’s Medicaid programs for children and developed a multidisciplinary research agenda around family violence and social determinants of health.

As her research program advanced, she found the most important part of her work to be partnerships with community-based, direct service providers. More and more she became disenchanted with the distance between her academic position and the community organizations she cared about. In short, the structure of university-based research was not supportive to community-based research. In 2021, Dr. Bright left academia to found the Center for Violence Prevention Research. Her goal was to create a research organization that was accessible to non-researchers and that conducted research with immediate implications for practice.

Dr. Bright’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the American Psychosomatic Society, AcademyHealth, and several not-for-profit organizations. She has published dozens of papers in high impact scientific journals including JAMA Pediatrics and the Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).